A
new analysis of Florida's presidential vote seems to confirm that Vice
President Al Gore was the choice of the state's voters, although various
irregularities cost him thousands of votes and could tip the state's 25
electoral votes – and the presidency – to Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

The analysis suggests that Gore
may have lost about 13,000 votes in Palm Beach County because of voter
confusion over an illegally designed ballot. With Bush's current lead at
930 votes – pending recounts in three counties – those lost votes
alone could have provided Gore a clear margin of victory.

The analysis also supports
claims by many elderly voters in Palm Beach County that they were
confused by the so-called "butterfly ballot," which listed
presidential choices in two side-by-side lists rather than in one
vertical column as required by Florida law.

These voters said they feared
they accidentally cast their votes for Reform Party nominee Patrick
Buchanan or negated their ballots by trying to correct their mistake and
voting for both Gore and Buchanan.

After the election, Buchanan
acknowledged that his surprising blip of 3,704 votes in the staunchly
Democratic county, with a large Jewish population, almost certainly
resulted from confusion. Buchanan said he believed those votes were
intended for Gore.

Buchanan's total in Palm Beach
County exceeded his tally in any other county by about 2,700.

It now appears that Gore lost
even more votes – possibly in excess of 10,000 ballots – when voters
tried to correct their error. After mistakenly punching a hole for
Buchanan, these Palm Beach voters punched a second hole for Gore.

Since Buchanan's name was
positioned diagonally above and to the right of Gore's, the Reform Party
candidate would have been the beneficiary of the first punch from voters
thinking they were picking Gore, whose name was the second on the
left-hand list directly below Bush's.

The confused voters, apparently
realizing their mistake, then poked a second hole directly next to
Gore's name.

In Palm Beach County, there were
19,120 ballots disqualified because of double-voting. The Palm Beach
County canvassing board analyzed a sample of these disqualified ballots.
From that sample of 144 ballots, 80 ballots – or 56 percent – showed
punches for both Buchanan and Gore. [NYT, Nov. 21, 2000]

If that sample percentage were
applied to the entire batch, Gore potentially lost 10,622 votes. If one
counts 2,700 of the Buchanan votes as likely confused voters for Gore,
that would put Gore's lost vote in Palm Beach County alone at more than
13,000.

In a statewide race with Bush
leading by fewer than 1,000 votes, the confusion in Palm Beach County
could account for far more than the deciding margin.

On Monday, a local judge
sympathized with the confused voters but rejected a lawsuit seeking a
re-vote in Palm Beach County. The judge said such a remedy was beyond
his authority.

In other counties, allegations
of outright misconduct have been raised. The NAACP has complained that
Florida authorities intimidated African-Americans who were trying to
vote.

In Seminole County, a lawsuit is
proceeding alleging that election officials gave Republicans special
access to absentee-ballot applications so corrections could be made and
the votes counted for Bush.

Democrats and individual voters
with similar deficiencies in their applications were not given an
opportunity to make corrections, The New York Times reported on
Nov. 21. Bush outpolled Gore among Seminole County's absentee ballots by
nearly 5,000 votes, again far more than Bush's current lead.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have
lodged a complaint of their own. They claim that early network
projections of a Gore victory in Florida based on exit polls cost them
votes in the Florida panhandle where the polls stayed open an hour later
than the rest of the state.

But GOP leaders have misstated
the chronology of events. They assert that the networks awarded Florida
to Gore at 7 p.m., just as the polls in most of Florida closed. The
network projections actually occurred at about 7:50 p.m. – only 10
minutes before the panhandle polls closed.

Though the networks certainly
could have and obviously should have waited, it is unclear that any Bush
voter decided not to go to the polls because of a projection that
occurred only minutes before the polls closed. It's unlikely that more
than a few late-arriving voters were even aware of Gore's projected
victory.

It also now appears that those
exit polls correctly assessed voter preferences in Florida, though not
by adequate margins to justify an Election Night call of the race.

Based on the still-evolving
record in Florida, the evidence indicates that a combination of errors
and irregularities ultimately could reverse the voters' preference for
Gore.

In turn, that reversal of the
public's will – by giving Florida's 25 electoral votes to Bush –
also would reverse the will of the American people, who favored Gore by
a clear though narrow margin.

With more than 50 million votes
in his column – the second-highest total ever
and the largest vote tally by any non-incumbent president – Gore now
leads Bush in the national popular vote by about 300,000 ballots.

A Bush victory in the Electoral
College – with Florida putting him over the top – would make the
Texas governor the first popular-vote loser in modern times to claim the
White House. The last such case was in 1888.

Even with the Florida Supreme
Court allowing hand recounts to proceed, Bush seems poised to do just
that, winning the presidency although the people of the United States
and apparently the voters of Florida wanted someone else.